Dear White People, a new comedy about four black students at a predominantly white college, premieres today, after winning over audiences at the Sundance Film Festival, not to mention the Special Jury Award for Breakthrough Talent. The talent in question is the film’s writer and director, Justin Simien, who was recently named as one of _Variety’_s 10 Directors to Watch. Simien started working on the script right before graduating from college in 2005. “The first draft was a not-so-thinly-veiled take on my college campus experience,” Simien says. “It was kind of a more Altmanesque, seven-character, unwieldy multi-protagonist story.”

After a few years in Hollywood, working on other people’s movies and reworking his own script, Simien decided to produce a concept trailer for the film and post it on Indiegogo in hopes of crowd-funding the project. “It just seemed like the only thing to do, because shopping a script around—I know Hollywood enough to know that wasn’t probably going to go nowhere.” The trailer was a hit online, gathering more than 25,000 fans and more than $40,000 for production costs. From there, Simien began looking for his cast and location scouting, and eventually attracted more producers.

When it premiered in January at Sundance, Dear White People critics raved about its refreshing take on race. The film follows four students: Sam, a biracial activist student who has reluctantly been chosen as the face of black causes on campus. Lionel, a gay aspiring journalist who is shunned by his peers because of his love of Robert Altman’s films and his outdated afro. Coco, a communications student who aspires to reality-show fame. And Troy, the dean’s son and a clean-cut perfectionist who is tiring of always having to do the right thing.

All four characters have a bit of Simien in them, but one in particular stands out. “I think Lionel is closer to my heart because I’ve always just felt like a misfit,” Simien says. “I never quite lived up to the image of the black man as I saw it growing up. I was never listening to the right music at the right time or wearing the right clothes at the right time. I was still listening to Michael Jackson and everyone had sort of moved on to gangster rap. Alanis Morissette when everyone else was listening to En Vogue. I was always out of synch.”

Simien is hesitant to label the movie as even being about race. “For me, it’s about identity vs. self,” he says. “And the relationship between who we truly are and who we present ourselves as.” Indeed, this is the conflict at the heart of the movie. It’s in Sam’s insistence on choosing a side of her biracial background, instead of embracing both. It’s in Troy’s calculated jokes, which gain him favor with the white students who run the humor magazine he wishes to write for. And it’s in Coco, who portrays an angry black woman caricature on camera with the goal of winning more YouTube followers.

Simien hopes Dear White People will inspire the production of other projects in a similar vein. “One thing I know for sure it’s that if this movie is successful, there are so many great scripts that are going to get through,” he says excitedly. “I want the Latino Do the Right Thing to happen. I want filmmakers whose voices are not represented to get a shot.”